Gaming & Culture —

PC Prince of Persia contains no DRM. It’s a trap!

Ubisoft has shipped the PC version of the newest Prince of Persia to retails …

Let me fill you in on something we've learned in the past year: PC gamers do not like DRM. EA was reminded of this the hard way, and every PC release that includes SecuROM inspires legions of gamers to claim that they'll refuse to buy the game because of the program's inclusion. Ubisoft has heard you, and the retail, boxed version of Prince of Persiaon the PC has absolutely no copy protection. It's doubtful the company is doing this out of the goodness of its heart, however.

"You're right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games," Community Manager UbiRazz wrote on the official forum. "A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we'll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine." He goes on to note that only retail copies are DRM-less, since the Steam-bought version will, of course, to be tied to Steam's authentication system.

Ubisoft has already had its eye blackened a few times recently when it comes to DRM and piracy. Assassin's Creedsuffered from a shoddy PC port, and the game constantly tried to authenticate online, causing problems for players who bought the game. "The address is 216.98.48.53:3074 random local, 3 attempts every 75 seconds, registering to Ubisoft in Ontario. DRM messing with honest patrons again... as long as the game is running it will keep hammering away at that address," one forum member wrote. Gamers often had to shut off their Internet connection to play the game.

In another case, a patch for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 broke the game for some people; the game asked for the CD to be placed in the drive, and of course players who purchased the game online had no disc. Ubisoft's solution? Copy a CD crack from a warez group and issue it as a patch. If you can't beat pirates, you can at least take their work and pass it on as a cheap way to fix your messes. The irony was delicious, but gamers were not amused.

So what will happen with Prince of Persia? The game will be pirated. The game would have been pirated no matter what DRM was placed in the game, naturally, but by removing DRM and waiting for the title to hit the torrents, Ubisoft has given itself an out whenever they're taken to task over DRM in the future. "We tried removing it, and we lost money!" will be an easy answer from now on. The remarks from the Community Manager already sound surly and antagonistic, as if the company is simply waiting to get ripped off to prove its own point.

Ubisoft could let the pirates do their thing and remove the DRM without framing it as a challenge to the community—rarely is a pirated copy a lost sale—but that's asking a lot from an industry that continues to see its customers as guilty until proven innocent. We'll be waiting for the inevitable "we told you so" press release from Ubisoft.